I’ve read that Solitaire in Windows 10 has ads in it. Then I read this about their privacy policy. It seems like the strategy of ad based monetization becoming natively embedded in their products is alive and well. This was a strategy that was articulate to me ~10 years ago. Slow and steady wins the race?

Summing up these 45 pages, one can say that Microsoft basically grants itself very broad rights to collect everything you do, say and write with and on your devices in order to sell more targeted advertising or to sell your data to third parties. The company appears to be granting itself the right to share your data either with your consent “or as necessary”.

Ad blocking on iOS 9 will improve web browsability on mobile but the reality is that mobile engagement is app driven. Will increased browsability change that mix?

TL:DR: when Apple’s iOS 9 comes out in September, there’s going to be a dramatic uptake of ad blockers on iOS – and it’s going to have far-reaching effects not just on websites and advertisers, but potentially also on the balance in mobile platforms and even on Google’s revenues.

Sponsored Listening prompts people to watch a short video or click on a rich media ad to unlock one hour of ad-free listening. Per Pandora, those pilot ads boosted purchase intent by 30 percent and brand awareness by 12 percent.

Each video ad is at least 15 seconds long and can run up to two-and-a-half minutes long. Jonathan Eccles, Pandora’s product lead, said people are interacting “tremendously” with content for more than the 15-second requirement.

We decided it’s time to fix this, not only in YouTube, but across a user’s entire experience at Google. We want to formally retire the notion that a Google+ membership is required for anything at Google… other than using Google+ itself.

I ended up reading the source article because this Techcrunch article drops a lot of the nuance. It’s interesting because you could argue that from a CTR standpoint, you could say the interstitials were effective in driving people to install the app. Since Google’s app installs remained largely unaffected, they decided to retire the interstitial to boost mobile website activity.

The ad giant has just blogged about the result of its study, saying it found almost two-thirds (69 per cent) of visitors served with an interstitial for its Google+ social service abandoned the page entirely — neither downloading the app, nor going on to visit the mobile website — attributing this to the added friction of serving mobile users with an interstitial.

DraftKings, one of the top daily fantasy sports companies, has raised $300 million in new funding led by 21st Century Fox’s Fox Sports unit. The deal also calls for DraftKings to spend roughly $250 million on ads with the TV company over the next three years, according to sources familiar with the agreement.

Today, Google released an update to Chrome for iOS with support for both the Physical Web and Eddystone. Mobile developers of all types – brands, advertisers and retailers – can now use beacons to broadcast websites directly to Chrome and they’ll be displayed in the iOS Notification Center.

If you’re a long time search exec, every problem looks like a crawlable webpage:

A former Google executive, Mayer is keenly focused on mobile search. “I actually think that desktop search is a reasonably well-understood problem,” she said. “It has good solutions available in market, and it comes with a lot of user expectations. There is not a lot of room left for innovation in our estimation. We think that all of the interesting innovation is going happen on the mobile search side.”